Freedom of the Brush

by DANIEL CATTON RICH

1

THOUGH few of us suspect the fact, American painting is facing a major change. Up to the beginning of the Second World War, our tradition could be called a broadly realistic one; the American artist, from Copley to Hopper, had been chiefly concerned with recording the objective facts of nature. When he occasionally colored fact with romanticism, as in the landscapes of the Hudson River School, he still rooted his vision in precise observation.

Today this tradition is being challenged by the growth of a new American school of non-representational painting. By non-representation I mean the various abstract modes as well as the irrational and automatic picture-writing of the surrealists. A typical studio of the moment in Eighth Street, or for that matter in Laramie, Wyoming, is apt to disclose canvases full of “geometric” or “bimorphic” forms. These may be brightly, placidly, or violently painted and labeled “Composition,” “Motion in Space,” or “Lunar Madness.” What is happening to American painting, and what are some of the reasons behind this shift from the real world to the more private world of forms and dreams?

It has been evident for some time that non-realistic approaches to painting have been greatly on the increase. Abstract and surrealist canvases have invaded the large annual exhibitions of American art at Pittsburgh and Philadelphia; and in 1946, Carnegie Institute awarded its first prize to Karl Knaths for an abstraction, “Gear.” The latest annual exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art — always a sensitive barometer of advanced taste — turned out to be a triumph for non-representational forms.

Two years ago when the Art Institute of Chicago decided to arrange an exhibition of abstraction and surrealism in America, it was uncertain how widespread these movements were. Conservative critics had called them the “dabblings of a tiny minority” and had prophesied their quick death on American soil. It was necessary to explore the field, so the Institute sent two of its curators, Frederick A. Sweet and Mrs. Katharine Kuh, throughout the; country to study the problem and to bring back an exhibition of typical works.

These curators traveled over 25,000 miles. They started with a fairly small list of artists but they soon discovered more and more painters working in these modes, until finally the trail led them into every section of the United States. They attended exhibitions, huge and small; they delved into college and university art departments; they sat for hours in the more advanced sales galleries on 57th Street and knocked on the studio doors of hundreds of painters.

They found that where, ten years ago, one or two artists in a community were experimenting with non-representation, today the number has doubled or trebled. Hundreds of men and women throughout America are working vigorously with abstract means, attempting to convey their personal emotion through lines, colors, effects of light and texture, rather than through transcriptions of nature. As for American artists under thirty, abstraction, together with a moody form of expressionism, has become one of the two most popular approaches to painting.

The curators expected to find the greatest number of artists in the large cities but were surprised to run across them in Walnut Creek, California, Muscoda, Wisconsin, or Lincoln, Nebraska. They were interested to note that at least three out of every four painters working in these modes were nativeborn Americans, contradicting the often repeated statement that art of this sort is the work of “foreigners.” Most of all, they were impressed by the wide variety of styles and expression. They felt that the non-realistic approach was gathering momentum and had largely taken over the progressive wing of American art.

The exhibition which opened in Chicago in November allows a few generalizations on the main drives of the movement. It is clear that orthodox surrealism is on the wane. Some of its leaders, Max Ernst, Tchelitchew, and the ubiquitous Salvador Dali, arc at present in America, but their work has lost the power to shock which distinguished the early phases. Gone are the savage paranoia and decadent nostalgias. Perhaps surrealism, as an art movement, ended with the outbreak of the war. No surrealist could imagine monsters to compete with Hitler and Göring or invent sadisms to equal those of Buchenwald or Lidice.

By far the greater proportion of the Chicago exhibition fell into that baffling class called “abstract.” In fact — and this is significant — most American work cannot be pigeonholed in one of the many convenient European isms of which the twentieth century has furnished us so long and complicated a list. There is practically no cubism, in the sense of reducing and recombining aspects of solid form into a new pattern. Such experiment belongs to the past and evidently no self-respecting abstractionist would paint a cubist picture today any more than he would go out and do an impressionist sunset.

Curiously enough the chief influence at work here does not seem to be Picasso. American painters of this type seem wary of Picasso’s tremendous virtuosity. They glance away from open competition with the Spanish prestidigitator, preferring to lean on the rarefied textures and muted palette of Braque. The spidery handwriting of Klee, the flowing color jottings of Miró, have broadened the American vocabulary of form. Fantastic and surrealist elements in both Klee and Miró have sometimes joined with the austere shapes of Russian and German constructivism. One of the favorite American modes, expressionism, has furnished heightened color and rhythmic distortions.

The result is a stimulating crossing of styles from which emerge several distinct native types. There is evolving a dynamic American picture, built on sensations of speed, movement, and kaleidoscopic change. Some of these elements may be found in the paintings of Stuart Davis, long an influence in American abstraction. But younger artists like John Seenhauser, Seymour Franks, and Oscar Fischinger more consciously reflect the pace and tension of American life. They have consulted the air view and the air map. In other abstractions of this class it is not uncommon to find echoes of futurism, a long-dead Italian movement, which stressed velocity and dynamics. Other devices, such as the multiple or split image, are clearly inspired by the contemporary motion picture.

It has been said by its critics that abstraction is created in a vacuum and has no connection with the life or environment of the artist. Worth noting is the fact that Americans are developing certain regional themes within the broader national framework. The city is a constant source of inspiration to artists like Robert Jay Wolff and Rudolph Weisenborn; it invades the fantastic forms of Charles Howard’s neon-lighted world as well as the kinetic cityscapes by Nan Lurie.

Far in the Northwest, artists like Mark Tobey and Morris Graves of Washington reflect, in their work, the subaqueous light and mystery of that region. Consulting Chinese calligraphy and Sung landscape painting, they have developed their own styles, which in turn have had considerable influence on artists of this area.

In Oregon the veteran cowpuncher C. S. Price has long been painting abstractions in thick, heavy pigment which suggests the earth, while the low tones and deep colors relate to the heavy forests of the North.

Boston, with its circle of artists round Karl Zerbe, has produced a full-scale expressionist movement. But in the work of certain Boston contemporaries rich, fantastic color is employed to suggest the decaying moods of surrealism or used abstractly.

Various artists, of which Steve Wheeler is perhaps the best known, have turned to American Indian motifs, much as the French cubists once consulted African sculpture. Another group of painters is exploring the Indian pictograph. Ellwood Graham and Adolph Gottlieb manage to suggest an ancient and ambiguous world in their painted symbolism.

Quite as characteristically American is a new lyric approach found in works by William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell. Paintings like theirs, large in scale, broad and sweeping in their forms, and often brilliant in color, make up a well-marked department of native abstraction. Many artists remain unclassifiable. The abstract movement in America cannot be subdivided into a few schools. Above all, our painters in this mode are strong individualists. They are attempting to forge a personal language, create their own particular poetry. Many of them are extremely able technicians and have been trained in academic and realistic practices. There is little of the amateur about their designing or color control. They have adopted this way of working because it suits them; with Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the pioneers of abstraction in America, they can remark: “I found that I could say things with colors and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way — things that I had no words for.”

2

WHAT lies behind this sudden extension of abstract and surrealist modes in America? There are several apparent causes. One is the fact that since the end of the WPA Art Project in 1943 the artist is again on his own, and painting has once more become his private affair. During the period of government patronage, artists tended to adopt social themes and work in a manner easily grasped by the mass audience. The program of mural painting, sponsored by the Treasury Department as well as by the WPA, stressed popularity of subject matter and legibility of form. At no time in the history of American art had so many painters grappled with the problem of how to remain individualists and at the same time communicate with the widest public.

Today all this is changed. The artist pleases himself, not a WPA foreman or a panel of experts in the Treasury. As Milton Brown has noted in a recent survey of contemporary art, this situation is ‘driving the artist further into himself.” Whether this is good or bad depends wholly on the result. The fact that artists employ abstract rather than realistic modes does not make them necessarily “escapists.” A great deal of American abstraction is clearly bound up with the worlds of contemporary science and higher mathematics. And it is no accident that three recent abstractions, violently effective in their means, were inspired by and called “Hiroshima.”

Though non-representational painting has been spreading rapidly, we must not forget, too, that it has had a lengthy history in the United States — almost as long as in France, where it was conceived. Our first experiences with abstraction go back more than forty years, to the shock and inspiration of the “Armory Show,” where in 1913 Americans saw the experiments of the cubist and laughed, just a little uneasily, at Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending the Staircase.” The abstract section of this huge international exhibit, according to one thoughtful painter who was present at the time, “created a real sensation” and “there was no American artist who saw this show but was forced to revalue his artistic concepts.”

The result was a brief flurry in which many Americans “tried on” the new styles but soon put them aside. A few like Joseph Stella, Alfred Maurer, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Arthur B. Dove persisted. In the thirties, abstraction was in a sharp decline. Always a movement with strong international affiliations, it was threatened by two native reactions: the strident “American Scene,” which documented the ruin of our cities and the bleakness of our farms; and a smaller but highly publicized trend towards Social Protest. For the moment, non-representation seemed doomed and Stuart Davis, one of our ablest painters in this manner, writing in 1935, had to look back to the years 1915-1927 to discover the golden age of abstraction in the United States.

There were vigorous counterforces, however, working for its preservation. The Museum of Modern Art, opening in 1929, included all types of twentieth-century expression and crystallized a number of earlier efforts of which the Société

Anonyme, founded in 1920 by Katherine S. Dreier and the artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, was probably the most notable. Through its striking exhibitions which circulated round the country and through its brilliant publications which became known the world over, the Modern Museum vastly strengthened the case for vanguard painting. A whole Museum of Non-Objective Painting, including work by Americans, was founded in New York in 1939 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Three years later Peggy Guggenheim opened her highly controversial gallery, “Art of this Century,” where amid fantastic installations were shown abstract and surrealist exhibits, including the work of many young and unknown American artists.

The arrival of practically a boatload of famous European modernists, just before the war, also vastly stimulated the non-representationalists. Just as abstraction in 1915 had been given a forward spurt by the lively presence in America of three well-known French artists — Duchamp, Picabia, and Gleizes — the present group of refugees met and influenced American painters and were in turn influenced, often to advantage, by their own changed environment. Léger, Masson, Ernst, and Tanguy did some of their most striking work in the United States, and their presence here added enormous prestige to abstract and surrealist movements. The austere Mondriaan, who worked in lines and rectangles and primary colors, actually modified some of the elements of his style and produced two paintings called “Broadway Boogie Woogie” and “Victory Boogie Woogie.” During the war these European leaders practically moved the center of the art world from Paris to New York, and there were many Americans anxious to participate.

Other modernists, fleeing Nazi persecution, had already landed in American universities and art schools, where they set to work busily teaching the precepts of advanced European expression. Especially popular have been the theories of the German Bauhaus, with its fusion of industrial and fine arts. Josef Albers at Black Mountain College and the late Moholy-Nagy at the Chicago Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) trained a number of young artists in constructivist practice, while here and there throughout the country, as in Boston at the Museum School, or at Brooklyn College, or at Washington University in St. Louis, a most advanced curriculum has been set up, as a result of the appointment of some European modernist. These artists and teachers have helped to diffuse nonrepresentational ways of working, and now their students are spreading the same ideas in state universities and public schools. This fact helps to explain the appearance of non-realistic painting throughout the nation in so relatively short a time, and identifies the source of German elements in American abstraction.

In addition we must never discount the worldwide fame of such artists as Picasso and Braque, who by the example of a lifetime devoted to experimental painting have rallied many artists to their side. Increased buying of European and American abstractions by our collectors, and the more or less permanent exhibitions of such paintings in the museums of Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Buffalo — to name only a few — have had the effect of interesting hundreds of young, potential artists and, at the same time, of lending a cloak of respectability to what once was regarded as a period of scandalous anarchy.

3

WITH all its present vitality and broad sponsorship, the non-realistic movement in America faces a major struggle. So far it has largely been in the protecting hands of its friends and devotees. The real test will come when it goes before a wider public.

It is more than possible that the different kinds of abstraction which make up the dynamic part of the movement are running head on into collision with a growing conservatism in all fields of American taste. In this connection the sharp and hysterical reaction of Congress to the exhibit of modern American painting bought and circulated by the State Department is a heavy straw in the wind. Called “Advancing American Art,” this exhibition was formed at the request of several foreign governments whose citizens were genuinely curious to see what the United States had been producing in modern art. A group of seventy-nine paintings, it was composed, according to the critic of the New York Times, “of extreme expressionism, fantasy, surrealism and abstraction.” The exhibit produced a smear campaign in the Hearst press to which were soon joined the protests of various conservative artists’ organizations. So violent did the fight become that Secretary Marshall halted the very successful showings of the exhibit in Prague and Haiti and ordered the paintings home in disgrace.

Meanwhile, Americans were regaled by the spectacle of a Congressional committee baiting the Assistant Secretary of State, William Benton, as he tried to explain the purpose of the exhibit and submitted evidence to prove that most of these artists were not only nationally known but represented in our major museums. Feeling against the exhibit ran so high that appropriations for the cultural program of the State Department were endangered. When Mr. Benton wrote a letter to President Truman setting forth the facts, he received the following sharp reply as quoted in the press of June 4: —

“I do not pretend to be an artist or a judge of art, but I am of the opinion that so-called modern art is merely the vaporings of half-baked, lazy people. An artistic production is one that shows infinite ability for taking pains and if any of these so-called modern paintings show any such infinite ability, I am very much mistaken. There are a great many American artists who still believe that the ability to make things look as they are is the first requisite of a great artist — they do not belong to the so-called modern school. There is no art at all in connection with modernism, in my opinion.”

While it would be easy to refute the President on his knowledge of art, and to demonstrate that many modernists work harder and take considerably more

“pains” than their traditionalist contemporaries, and that Mr. Truman’s test of verisimilitude as the requisite of great art is incredibly naïve as well as historically wrong, his reply is significant. The fact that the head of our government has gone on record with such a statement has alarmed certain critics who remember that the leaders of totalitarian regimes have not hesitated to order what and how their artists should paint. They detect in America a growing pressure from reactionary sources to obstruct the freedom of the brush, and regard the case of the State Department exhibition as a serious defeat for liberalism. It is in such uncertain atmosphere that abstract American art appears for the first time as a major movement.

Painters of non-representational canvases may expect, as a matter of course, opposition not only from the Academy, one of whose immemorial duties is to denounce new ideas in art as heresy, but also from certain former friends. Typical is the case of Eugene Speicher, the well-known portrait and figure painter. For years Mr. Speicher has been identified with the more progressive tendencies in American art and has been an understanding follower of new inventions, whether or not he employed them in his own painting. But when questioned by a Hearst reporter on the State Department exhibit, he replied: —

“Abstraction is in every great work of art; but it is the skeleton around which warmth and color and beauty are added. Modern art — that is, the phase of it which you are talking about — insists on showing just the skeleton, which belongs in the classroom, not in a gallery.” Significantly enough, while the exhibition of abstraction and surrealism was being planned for Chicago, the strongest objections to the idea came not from the ultraconservative painters but from those who stand on middle ground.

There is another element in the national picture which helps to obstruct public acceptance of nonrealistic modes. That is the sometimes artless, and more often artful, confusion of advanced art with the political Left. In the recent State Department case certain Congressmen laid great stress on the fact that a number of the artists represented in the exhibition had once belonged to Communist-front organizations. The logic of politics is inescapable: therefore all modern artists are Communists. During a period when loyalties are under painful scrutiny, it is easy to dismiss what one does not like, or understand, as subversive. Even the editor of a prominent American art magazine has hopelessly muddled the problem by solemnly announcing: “Art in America is continuing to bear left of center, in direct opposition to the rightist trend in national politics.”

As a matter of fact, these newer tendencies in American art are apt to suffer an even more bitter attack from the Left than from the Right. The Communist party line has long been established in regard to abstract painting. As early as 1921, Lenin, in a famous manifesto, denounced the futurists, constructivists, and suprematists and stated that “art belongs to the people. It must have its deepest roots in the very depths of the wide working masses. It must be understood and liked by them.” Stalin ordered art in contemporary Russia to become “Socialist Realism,” and the present Soviet school of uninspired illustration and tiresome propaganda has been the result.

It is ironic that at the very moment when our abstractionists and surrealists are being attacked as

Communists, the Communists themselves are accusing such artists of serving “the selfish interest of the bourgeoisie” and “catering to their decadent and perverted tastes.”

The chief hope for acceptance of the American abstract modes may lie in another direction. While the public remains unaware of these trends in painling, or potentially hostile towards them, it has already met and approved them in other spheres. Modern architecture, modern furniture and design, not only use many of the same elements found in pictures of the non-representational school but rest on the same basic principles. Unless we confront a typical piece of today’s printing with a page done twenty years ago, we can hardly realize the revolution which has taken place in typography and layout — a revolution closely paralleling changes in twentieth-century painting.

Meanwhile advertising, always on the lookout for new visual and psychological excitement, has discovered the dynamic core in abstraction and surrealism. Perhaps mass America is even now being favorably conditioned for advanced art through the medium of our railway posters and perfume advertisements.